


of salt and sweat

by ceraunos



Series: sanctum [4]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Muteness, Post-Season/Series 04, Trauma, and positive recovery, i can't leave a happy ending alone, mute flint, so i added 3000 words of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-07-16 10:51:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16084628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceraunos/pseuds/ceraunos
Summary: He has lived with silence for so long that he doesn’t notice, initially, when James stops speaking.The man, stoic and silent, between his legs is not a man he knows and when he kisses him Thomas recognises the lips but not the hard desperation they are pleading with.~sister story & sequel to 'between sun and soil' but works as a stand alone too.





	of salt and sweat

_Odysseus obeyed her, and his heart rejoiced. Then Pallas Athene, daughter of aegis-bearing Zeus, established peace between the two sides._

_\- Book XXIV, The Odyssey._

 

An uncommon breeze rushes through the crops and it carries a trace of salt and sweat that, though the sea has never been kind to him, smells like home. A voice is crying out in an elation it did not know was possible anymore and he knows, distantly, it is his own. The wind is a cool relief against his back but the body beneath his hands is warm. The thrumming in his chest feels like a return to wholeness.  

The man in his arms sinks to his knees and Thomas follows, his body listening to a call that is finally close enough to hear. 

When the dark comes he sleeps with the lightness of salvation in his aching muscles. The hand in his hair moves with an independence that doesn’t belong to desperate memory.

Then the early morning clouds, brought in on the wind, refuse to fully burn away as the sun rises and when he tells the tale of James McGraw it feels like finally saying goodbye. 

The man, stoic and silent, between his legs is not a man he knows and when he kisses him Thomas recognises the lips but not the hard desperation they are pleading with.

~

He has lived with silence for so long that he doesn’t notice, initially, when James stops speaking. 

Their first evening had been full of whispered assurances and awed wonder. 

“You’re here.” 

“Yes.”

“I’m alive.” 

“You’re alive.”

“You became a pirate.” 

“It seemed the best option.” 

Thomas had laughed at that and eventually James had joined in, shock making them numb to reality.

“Miranda?”

“I – It was – I’m so sorry.” Thomas had pulled his head into his shoulder as they wept together. 

“Come to bed?” James had paled visibly, even in the week dusk light, at the implications.

“I can’t –” 

“Just to sleep.” James’ hand had brushed periodically against his as they undressed, sharing the same small square of space beside the bed. 

~

When James stops speaking and it feels more natural than the unfamiliar lilt of conversation a deep horror settles within Thomas. He considers that perhaps part of him has been so utterly and permanently ruptured that even James’ company is too much for him to tolerate. For the first time in a long while he feels the sharp stab of anger. 

It doesn’t happen all at once. Those first few days James never lets Thomas out of his sight, following him like a guard. Every few moments his hand flutters out to touch, as if ascertaining that this really isn’t a figment of his imagination. Thomas finds himself doing the same; after so long of spectral nightmares and plaintive daydreams it’s jarring to have the real person beside him again. 

James is inquisitive too, asking about Thomas’ house, his small book collection, the types of crops he farms. They give him a shovel and Thomas teaches him how to turn the soil and considers how surreal this would have seemed fifteen years ago. Now it just feels like the next step in a very long journey. Thomas doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t know what he could possibly ask that wouldn’t dredge up the horrors James wakes from every night. They talk, briefly, of London and their life before all this but it feels too painful and too foreign and neither of them brings it up again. 

By the end of the first week, though, the questions have trickled to bare necessity (“is that water clean?”, “are you coming to bed?”, “can I use the soap?”) and then they turn to none at all. If something requires a conversation it seems James avoids it entirely. One evening Thomas turns to ask him if he wants salt on his meat and is met with wide eyed panic. Eventually James shrugs and mutters, very quietly, something that sounds like “perhaps”. Thomas, remembering the lack of fresh food at sea, puts a generous amount on and James doesn’t complain about it. 

Thomas doesn’t push. Of all people, he thinks he understands something of what James is facing. He has his own quirks, after all: refusing to wash with anything but scalding hot water, sleeping with blankets even in the heat of Georgia’s summer, never eating until he is full but always accepting food if it’s offered. After Bethlem he had relied on the strict routine of the plantation to learn how to be human again and still some days he has trouble remembering he is allowed perform basic acts of self care without asking permission.

As James lapses into muteness, an uneasy tension settles around Thomas, however. He knows, logically, that James’ condition is most likely a response to something he has no control over. He is also aware, though, that he has changed, significantly and irreversibly, since James last knew him. The idea that this is happening because James can’t reconcile the man he has found in his Thomas’ place begins to haunt him like a persistent sickness.

It is as if James is little more than one of Thomas’ particularly vivid imaginings. He performs his daily tasks in the field with a resolute diligence that clearly pleases their wary overseers and yet in all else he becomes lost, drifting from place to place without intent. He doesn’t touch anything until Thomas makes it clear he can, doesn’t sit until Thomas has, doesn’t go to bed until after Thomas is asleep and never speaks.

It becomes unbearable. Thomas has never been one for small talk, even in London, and now, after years of solitude, his inability to fill the silence that lingers around them forms a palpable desperation. Once, in a moment of curiosity during a long winter in Bethlem, he had screamed until his voice gave out and he threw up. He considers doing the same now but it hadn’t given him any relief then and he doubts it would do much good here either. 

One evening Thomas finds James sitting on the edge of the bed staring at his hands like he doesn’t recognise them. When Thomas kneels before him and wraps James’ fingers in his own James flinches and in an instant there is a palm against his neck and a foot on his chest pushing him into the floor. Just as quick they are gone and Thomas is left fighting to control his breath. When he is sure of his surroundings again he becomes aware that he is alone. He finds James huddled on the step outside the hut, retreated so far into the shadows he is barely visible.

“Follow me?” Thomas asks, holding out his hand to the hunched mass that is James. Very slowly, James reaches out and curls his fingers around Thomas’. Together they walk the perimeter of the rice fields, past the other men’s huts and to the back of the main house. A guard tracks them lazily with his gun and Thomas can feel James twitching to keep half an eye on the barrel. He wonders, with a wave of sorrow, at the amount of hatred one must have encountered for such an action to become second nature.

Behind the house the fence lowers and beyond it an expanse of mountains bloom from the horizon, disappearing to a cobalt and charcoal night. During long nights when black masses swarm against the edges of his mind, Thomas watches the mountains and feels entirely endless. He points at the moon, emerging above them in its first stages of opacity, and beside him James tips his head back and sighs softly at the stars. A gentle breeze brushes around them and, for the first time, the quiet feels comfortable. 

While he reads, Thomas fiddles idly with the collar of James’ shirt and it is only when James presses a paper light kiss on his knuckles that Thomas realises he wasn’t already asleep. He puts his book away and tucks James’ head under his chin, the scratch of short hair against his beard new and wonderfully tactile. 

Two mornings later Thomas catches James, only half awake and bleary eyed, trying to read over his shoulder. Thomas had woken before the sun, the tendrils of a dreamt memory withdrawing even as he came to consciousness. During the long summer days, recreation time is sparse and Thomas savours these stolen moments, even if he has read every book so many times the spines are disintegrating. 

During his sixth summer in Savannah, Thomas had been granted permission to, with supervision, tutor a nephew of Oglethorpe’s. Ever since, he receives occasional volumes from the young man that he thinks Thomas will enjoy. Despite the man’s questionable taste in literature and predisposal to adventure stories, Thomas has always welcomed each addition like driftwood to a drowning man but since James’ arrival he longs for his library in London with new intensity. 

He has considered reading to James several times and always changed his mind, at first wary of bringing about a dangerous sense of nostalgia. Now it is the content of his meagre library that concerns him most, though. Don Quixote has too much personal history while Robinson Crusoe seems inappropriate and paradoxical, everything considered. As does The Odyssey and The Tempest, while Thomas worries that Leviathan might either hit too close to home or be completely absurd to James (he wonders, too, why Oglethorpe allowed that particular piece of literature into the plantation). In a similar manner he disregards the rest of his collection, wishing his memory for Milton or Plato were better these days. 

A bell rings outside and the working day begins with the first fragments of morning light. Thomas doesn’t read aloud and James doesn’t ask, but his eyes often wander to the shelf in the corner of the room. 

The plantation stops each Sunday, the morning bell signifying the start of an ad-hoc church service in the main house instead of the usual toil. For the first few years, Thomas had attended diligently, the civility and normality of it seemingly a gift of grace. These days he prefers to spend the time cleaning or sleeping or praying alone. He isn’t sure whether he’s praying to anyone anymore but it offers a relief nonetheless. 

During James’ third Sunday at the plantation Thomas watches him doze fitfully and begs God to grant some reprieve for him. That afternoon an apple rolls under the bed and Thomas and James both dive for it at the same time. James stands, victorious, fruit in hand and a surprised half smile playing at his lips. Thomas’ hand, however, has found something he had intentionally forgotten about a long time ago. The filthy and waterlogged copy of King James’ Bible was reluctantly given to him on request during his first winter at Bethlem. Back then it had been a grounding force, a sense of hope that goodness still existed beyond his walls. By the end, though, it had been a taunting presence and by the time he settled in Savannah the book had come to represent everything awful and terrifying about the hospital. He is about to toss it back under the spare blanket and old shirts he keeps under the bed when he considers it might have one more purpose yet. When he looks up James is holding out the half eaten apple to him and, even though he is not particularly hungry, he takes a bite, letting his teeth graze the tips of James’ fingers. 

They spend the rest of the afternoon sat side by side on the step taking it in turns to darn stockings. Thomas finds enough sticks and stones for a rudimentary game of draughts, carving a board into the soil, and James wins every round. The bible remains half visible under the bed for three more days.

On the fourth day James wakes screaming Thomas’ name. Thomas is already awake, his own unsettled dreams a common plague. He knows, by now, that James does not seek touch as comfort in these instances, knows it will result in Thomas pinned to the bed and a lingering guilt on James’ part. Instead, he takes a deep breath, lights a candle and reaches under the bed. The book smells like seawater and, below that, of the stench of Bethlem. He closes his eyes against a wave of nausea, next to him James whimpers faintly. 

 _“Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.”_ Thomas begins to read. _“If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?_ _But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.”_

He stops, aware that even in London James had been sceptical of religion and that he might be hindering, rather than helping, at present. But James is looking at him with huge wide eyes and his lips silently form the shape of “please”. Thomas continues.

 _“I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope._ _My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning._

As Thomas reads James rests his cheek against Thomas’ shoulder and as he does he feels wetness against his skin.

 _“Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption._ _And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.”_

James sobs, a single choked noise that Thomas nearly misses. He puts the book aside and presses his forehead to James’, arms circling his shaking body.

~

It becomes routine, after that. Each night Thomas reads to James and each night James sits a little closer, kisses a little longer. At first Thomas selects passages he thinks might be of help, those of redemption and forgiveness; of salvation or of peace. He avoids the old testament generally, cautious of it’s condemnation and anger. After a while, though, he begins opening the pages at random, realising that it’s the act of being read to as much as the words that soothes. One night he hears James scoff at the story of Noah and he makes a mental note to ask about it one day. It is the closest to a laugh he’s heard from James since that first evening and it sounds like the first rain after a long, dry summer. After that he makes an effort to throw in as many of the more absurd parts of the bible as possible just to hear it again.

A month passes. The weather turns and the end of the harvest becomes frenzied to clear the fields and replant before they flood. Thomas’ back refuses to straighten and even James winces when he lifts his arms above his head. One evening, Thomas is rubbing his shoulder, trying to work out enough tension to lie down, when James’ hand suddenly replaces his, massaging firmly. Thomas can’t help but moan low in his throat and though James stays intently focused on his task he presses a fleeting kiss above his ear. He still isn’t talking but, with the introduction of quick soft touches and a definite non-verbal communication, Thomas finds it endurable, at times relaxed even. He knows that this isn’t James’ natural state and that it can’t stay this way forever, though; there is something fractured within James that must still heal.

~

The pencil is a fluke of luck and bizarre compulsion. Thomas is in the main house’s office helping Oglethorpe decrypt an especially confused request for funds from an investor. They’ve been asking for a cut of Oglethorpe’s profits for years without seeming to understand that there aren’t any profits significant enough to take from. Thomas is trying to suggest that they wait a few more years until the plantation grows, rather than crippling it now, but whoever he is writing to is being particularly pig-headed about the whole issue.

Just as he’s ready to bang his head against the desk Oglethorpe stands, equally frustrated. The sudden movement jolts the table and something rolls off and hits Thomas’ foot. He’s at least fifty percent certain that if he asked Oglethorpe would probably loan him the pencil anyway, but it would create questions about what he intends to use it for and Thomas doesn’t have an answer for that at the moment. There’s also a fifty percent chance he would say no. While Oglethorpe is looking away at the window Thomas slips the pencil into his shoe. It nags at him all afternoon, the sudden instinct to steal something he doesn’t necessarily need.

It continues to pester him from where it sits, untouched, beside the bible on his bedside table; there is no reason for its being there and Thomas half considers returning it to Oglethorpe except then he would have to admit to taking it in the first place.

The harvest is finally finished and Thomas spends his days sewing the new crop, knee deep in boggy mud. James, on account of his good physical condition, is part of the group of men tasked with thrashing the rice. He comes in each evening exhausted and sticky with sweat and often collapses into bed without eating or even taking his boots off. The physicality seems to suit him, though, and Thomas notices him waking less during the night and seeming better rested in the mornings. He wonders if this is how James who was Flint existed.

One morning Thomas wakes and James isn’t next to him. He panics, suddenly alert, stood and close to shouting for him before he notices the bible open when it hadn’t been the night before. In the margin there are a few very small letters. Thomas recognises’ James’ writing even if the well practiced cursive is lost a little. He has to peer close to see what it says.  

‘I have seen hell. I was the devil.’

“James?” Thomas asks quietly, his voice shakes slightly. When he gets no reply he forces his legs to move, carrying him trace like into the room which is not the bedroom and then out of the door. His heart throbs against his ribs.

James is watching the sun rise over the mountains when Thomas finally finds him behind the main house. The relief is so palpable that a wave of dizziness washes over him and he struggles to steady himself. When James turns to him with the look of a man awaiting a gallows’ verdict Thomas suddenly starts to cry. He isn’t sure he knows how to stop. James is tensed as if ready to run and all Thomas can do is wrap his arms around him and hold on crushingly tight. His hands alternate between cradling James’ head and running up and down his spine. James remains ridged and unreciprocating under his touch.

“It’s alright. It’s alright.” He says over and over again wetly into James’ neck. He isn’t sure which of them he is reassuring but finally James goes slack in his arms and Thomas stumbles a little to keep them standing.

~

Once James begins to write it is like a flood and the bible quickly fills with new text, crammed in the margins and between lines. He tends to write at night while Thomas sleeps and in the morning Thomas chooses not to read it. James hasn’t said he can’t, but he isn’t sure he wants to. If it is something James needs him to know he’ll tell him. Because that’s possible now too.

 “Thomas?” He says, out of the blue while they clean up from dinner. Thomas is so shocked he nearly drops the plate he’s drying. His voice is lower and richer than in Thomas’ memory, although it’s also cracked and hesitant from disuse.

After a moment Thomas regains control of his thoughts and manages to respond. “Yes?”

James kisses him, smiling into it. “I love you.”

Thomas wonders if it intentionally came out with a hint insecurity in it. “I love you.” He says and keeps kissing him. The dishes dry themselves.

The second time James speaks it’s to tell Thomas to keep reading because he is still awake. The third time is to say no when Thomas starts to put salt on his potatoes. After that Thomas stops actively counting, although he’s sure there’s a subconscious part of him always keeping tally.

 

Epilogue:

 

They begin branching out into other books in Thomas’ library after James questioningly pulls Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government’ off the shelf.

 “A joke perhaps. Or a poor attempt at reform, I imagine.” Thomas explains.

The Odyssey remains untouched for now but together they pull apart texts on politics and philosophy with a playful sincerity. Thomas begins to recognise the differing options of McGraw and Flint as well as an unknown third; a softer and wearier voice, though no less principled. His own mind feels sharper and more alive than it has been in fifteen years and it is thrilling.

Just after Christmas James, somewhat sheepishly, presents Thomas with a copy of the King James Bible that looks almost pristine. Thomas wonders how many of the small black pearls James bribed Oglethorpe with to allow him to keep it. Then he kisses James. In the front he writes: 

‘Property of Thomas and James Hamilton.’ 

The Bethlem copy has long been returned to underneath the old shirts by this point and although occasionally, on the greyest of days, James still brings it out to scribble a few lines in, for the most part the duel horrors it holds remain safely out of sight and out of mind. 

He does eventually remember to ask James why he scoffed at Noah. James laughs.

“I was wondering who had it worse, Noah and his animals or Flint and his pirates.”

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Thomas reads psalm 130. The script writer in me is horrified at how little dialogue is in this, but I suppose that's the point.
> 
> I'm on tumblr as [ceraunos](http://ceraunos.tumblr.com). 
> 
> UPDATE: 
> 
> I don't have plans currently to write another long fic for this verse that's set after this one, but everything I write set after s4 exists within the same timeline so all the [tumblr drabbles](http://ceraunos.tumblr.com/tagged/am-writing) etc. give a glimpse at life after this for Thomas & James. So far that includes: 
> 
> [bronze & iron](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16829125/chapters/39604789#workskin) a festive scene set two years after this
> 
> [ this drabble ](http://ceraunos.tumblr.com/post/180315373063/things-you-said-at-1-am-for-flinthamilton-if) fills the prompt 'things you said at 1am' 
> 
> [to fight again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16296248) focused on Thomas' recovery, only semi in this timeline
> 
> [ this drabble ](http://ceraunos.tumblr.com/post/180037071178/a-stolen-kiss-for-flinthamilton-because-im) is a set after to fight again and fills the prompt 'a stolen kiss'
> 
> [ chapter 2 of grey & gold ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16338431/chapters/38225189) is a very sweet prompt fill for 'i wish you could see yourself as I do' and is set many years after this fic.


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